Medical accelerators are used for radiation treatment of cancer patients and emit radiation in 360°. A patient lies on a platform, while a head of the device is rotated around the body of the patient. Quality assurance (QA) of the integrity of the medical accelerators is paramount to ensure the safe delivery of radiation treatment. The two main criteria used for QA is radiation reproducibility and mechanical integrity of the machine. The QA tasks specifically consist of quantifying the accuracy and precision of mechanical motions of the accelerators, various optical indicators, and the delivered dosimetry. FIG. 1 illustrates a chart of QA tasks per medical accelerator that must be performed daily, monthly, and annually.
FIG. 2 illustrates a front view of a medical accelerator used for radiation treatment. As illustrated in FIG. 2, one task of QA is to ensure that radiation beams along an axis and the positioning aids, in the form of laser beams, align at an isocenter of the medical accelerator. QA of this alignment is important in order to verify that the radiation beams along axis 1 are configured to treat the patient accurately without causing burns or other undesired side effects.
At present, almost all of the QA tasks listed in FIG. 1 are performed with different apparatus. The mechanical and optical components are examined visually, where the data is not amenable to documentation. For example, a technician checks the light source by directing the source onto the patient couch, and rotating it to make sure it moves about the isocenter of the medical accelerator. The dosimetry is measured with a variety of ionization detectors with the two-dimensional array of discrete detectors being most popular. Higher resolution measurements are measured with films where the data conversion process can be tedious. Some of these tasks are performed on a daily, monthly or yearly basis, and can take hours to perform. For example, while daily maintenance only takes approximately 10 minutes, a monthly maintenance of such machines to test the output and the mechanical integrity of the machine typically will take between 5-6 hours, the results of the testing partially documented. In fact, annual maintenance on the machine can take approximately 4 days to complete.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a device that provides a faster and more accurate measurement of the QA of the integrity of medical accelerators. In addition, there is a need in the art for a single device that measures both mechanical and dosimetric QA tasks and produces documentable results regarding the QA measurements.